


When Hell Freezes Over

by thinfacedknave



Category: LazyTown
Genre: Alternate Universe - LazyTown, Character Death, Crime Drama, M/M, Murder Mystery, Nordic Noir inspired, Snowed In, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-09-22 23:52:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9630458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinfacedknave/pseuds/thinfacedknave
Summary: Glanni reflects on a life of petty criminality, particularly one incident he's never been able to forget.When a job-gone-wrong forces him to take refuge in a small Icelandic town, Glanni finds himself thrown up against the chief of police and trapped by a blizzard with no escape until the weather clears. But nothing happens, right? Exactly how much havoc can one man wreak in 7 days?





	1. Day 1: The Fence

“When I found out who little Robbie was marrying this time, I almost shit myself to death laughing.”

That seemed like a good start.

Normally Glanni wouldn’t have bothered planning things like speeches in advance. He certainly hadn’t last time. But he had so much to say about his little brother’s new husband-to-be that he barely knew where to begin. It had pained him not to blurt the whole sorry tale out over the phone when Robbie dropped the news that afternoon. To many it might have seemed a little premature to already be drafting a best man speech, but who else was Robbie going to ask?

He was currently staying with a guy called Steggi in a lovely tattoo parlour/autoshop/guest-house in Aachen, Germany. Hell if he knew how Robbie got their phone number. Steggi and his girlfriend had been friends of Glanni’s for a long time. They went back to the old days when he’d used to travel around Europe with a low-status biker gang called Mayhemtown. Gang was pushing it, really. At their most subscribed there had barely been twelve of them plus a disappointingly well-behaved Labrador, but this hadn’t stopped them from acquiring logo jackets and a jumped-up sense of self-importance. This coupled with a near psychopathic lack of regard for personal safety had made them, in their time, an outfit of minor infamy.

Steggi had left the life behind now. They all had in one way or another save Glanni, who’d never quite managed to make a proper go of ‘settling down’ the way all his old friends had. Now comfortably past forty, he still made his way from place to place with a dogged combination of petty criminality and bloody-minded confidence. Still, Steggi ran a good house, and was very hospitable to old friends who were looking to lie low for a little while.

Glanni’s most recent scheme to make a bit of money in diet pills had backfired when it was discovered he’d just been selling people blackcurrant skittles with the little ‘s’ rubbed off. This wouldn’t have been a problem were it not the case that one of his most grossly overcharged customers was also the wife of a prominent member of the Bulgarian Mafia. He’d ducked out of the country sharpish, but was now watching his back for the ‘businessmen’ who he’d convinced to plough investment capital into his supposed miracle obesity cure, whose money was partially in a locked Suitcase in Glanni’s car, and partially the car itself. It was an impulse purchase, picked up on his way between Poland and Germany from an obsequious old man who had agreed it was only right that a deposed Eastern European Monarch should drive a Rolls.

He was feeling a little irked by the whole experience, and was sure he’d developed repetitive strain injury from rubbing all the little initials off the pills by hand with the back end of a mechanical pencil. What a time to receive an unexpected call from family to share happy news.

Was that really the way to begin it?

“Hey little brother, I’m pretty sure I fucked your boyfriend’s dad.”

Now he would love to see how that went down as an opening line. He could imagine them, sitting at their tables, merry on champagne among the inevitably purple colour-scheme. His brother’s colleagues and acquaintances (lord knows he’d never had many friends). The kid, too. Sally or Stella or whatever his niece’s name was. Eh, she was probably old enough now to handle a bit of public laundry.

It was a hell of a coincidence, though.

He took a drag and watched the smoke uncurl against the cold night’s sky. As soon as Robbie said his fiance’s name it took him right back. Íþró. He thought at first it was the same guy, but it became clear that it wasn’t the father but the son who had found his way into Glanni’s extended family. He even remembered him vaguely. He’d definitely crossed paths with the son - not much more than a kid at the time - at least once during his short but eventful stay in that small Icelandic town nearly 20 years ago.

It made him think. It made him nostalgic. Or at least as close as he generally came to those sorts of sentimental feelings. It was a personal policy of Glanni’s that he never went back to a place if he could possibly help it. This rule was helped along by the various restraining orders, arrest warrants and potential bastard children that made return to most places physically impossible. But in that moment, lying on the roof of Steggy and Hilda’s Guest house, Glanni couldn’t think of anywhere he would like to be more than back in that pathetic, isolated hole of a fjord town where he’d met Íþró senior.

He gave it one more go.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. I want to thank my little brother, and his lovely new husband, for inviting us all here today. What a beautiful ceremony, huh? Great food. Great wine. Great people... 

“And do I have one hell of a story to tell you…”

It started at a ferry port in Denmark 17 years previously. Glanni sped onto the last commercial ferry out just as they were pulling up the ramp. Neither his ID nor car were his own. His brain was a thumping chasm of adrenaline as he tried to untangle the events of the last hour. He’d known that fence was bad. There was a feeling in the air as soon as they entered that parking garage that something large, mean and bloody was going to go down. It wasn’t so much a set-up as a skirmish.

As soon as Raucher started swinging that goddamn pipe he knew Mayhemtown were done for. All exits were blocked; there was nowhere to go. Steggi took down a couple of pigs barehanded before getting tazed in the back and crumpling to the ground in a twitching heap. The only thing Glanni knew for certain was that there was no way he was ever going to another Scandinavian prison. If he wanted people to ask him about his feelings every day for six months he would have gone back to alcoholics anonymous.

It wasn’t until he’d run as far as he could physically go that he realised the alternative was jumping down two storeys onto black ice. Still, the cops that weren’t nursing broken faces here hot on his heels, and he’d never been a fan of the sensation of tazing, so he vaulted the ledge, hung his body at its full extension and let go.

He was expecting to feel a rush of air, followed by a hot snap as one of his ankles gave way. What he got was slightly better and slightly worse. He fell right onto the windshield of a moving car.

Glanni bounced off and slid maybe 10 feet into the curb, taking a great deal of the skin off his right side and making contact with the pavement with a heavy thud.

“Hej!” He heard, as the shock receded. “Er du okay?” There were cold hands on him. “For Pokker.” It was the driver. He must have stopped. Glanni could see the car now, the driver-door wide open where the man had barrelled right out. He blearily became aware of the strangeness of this man’s hat. His immediate thought was ‘airline pilot’, which was the point at which he began to suspect concussion. There was shouting from two floors above and hurried footsteps. No time to be concussed!

The opportunity was just waiting there so, ever-resourceful, Glanni took it. What’s a little more head-trauma among friends? He headbutted the driver who was now leaning over him and made a dash for the open door of the car. Through the pain and the rush, he dimly registered that the engine was still running, and his foot stamped down on the accelerator before any higher functions had a chance to make their voices known. The door bounced shut. The tyres squealed as they found purchase on the icy ground, and Glanni made his escape.

It wasn’t until he was plunging down the motorway at about 90mph that his brain caught up with him enough to appreciate that this was one plush car he’d stolen. There was also a jacket on the passenger seat, same weird uniform as the hat, which yielded a bonanza of a wallet in the inside pocket.

The tired customs officer at the Ferry port barely glanced at the ID card before waving him through. In fact he was more polite to Glanni than anybody had been since his last court date. He just about made it before the vessel disembarked, and sat in the dark parking deck for a good 20 minutes with nothing but static buzzing around in his brain before he was able to re-engage his intellect.

Why? Why would a customs officer wave him through without properly checking his ID? Why would he attentively refer to him as ‘sir’ and make sure to tell him that the ferry was leaving imminently? People only tended to call Glanni ‘sir’ when he paid them for it.

That was when the penny dropped. He grabbed the jacket and examined the gold braid. Not airline pilot, you moron, chauffeur! He opened the glove compartment and removed a bundle of documents, all of which were headed with the Danish coat of arms. There was one more penny left to drop, and when it did it dropped so hard that Glanni almost burst a lung. The laughter came in a silent convulsing wave. He collapsed forward on the steering wheel as tears creased in his eyes.

This wasn’t just any car. This was the private car of the Prime Minister of Denmark.

This just kept getting better.

An unspecified number of hours later he emerged under a frosty night’s sky into a small Icelandic fishing town that had no idea what was about to hit it.

Which is to say, other than a small-time criminal who’d accidentally robbed a head of state, one of the biggest storms they’d seen for years.

The snow was already piling up as Glanni maneuvered the vehicle across the town. The fact that it was dark as hell didn’t mean much, he'd been told, in this part of the world. But he was assured by the clock that it was somewhere around 10:30pm. He didn’t really have a plan. Current ideas centred around driving overnight to Reykjavik, dumping the car on the outskirts and finding out whether there were any strip joints this far north where the dancers weren’t wearing turtlenecks and scarves. Then maybe he could see about finding out what happened to the rest of Mayhemtown.

A jolt in the road made him bite his tongue. Shit.

He spun the car’s wheels a little bit to see if he could free it, but no good. All this bloody snow. He hadn’t been able to make out where road ended and snowbank began, and had now managed to get his car well and truly wedged by the side of the road, right outside city hall. He put on the chauffeur’s jacket and went to see if he could dig it out. The cold hit him like a sharp slap in the face that just kept on slapping. By this point the snowstorm was turning into a blizzard and the way the snow was piling up on top of the vehicle, burying it almost faster than he could dig with frozen hands, was beginning to concern him.

“Hej þú!”

Oh god, not again. He turned and saw a figure bounding out of City Hall and wading towards him through the fast-rising snowfall. Glanni immediately recognised him as a cop. Shit. That was fast. 

“Hvað ertu að gera?!”

The cop called out. The winds dragged most of his voice out to sea, not that Glanni could have understood a word of it anyway. He couldn’t see the cop’s face; he had an enormous coat buttoned right the way up and the rest of him seemed to be hood or hat. Glanni could feel his thin jacket soaking with icy water and sticking to him. His hands had gone completely numb. He went back to digging the car out, this time with renewed urgency.

The police officer grabbed his arm. This was very bad. He tried to pull it back but found this guy to be surprisingly strong.

“Hey, get the fuck off me!” He shouted through the freezing air. How much of it made it through that faceless blue coat, he had no way of knowing.

“Are you from the ferry?” The figure said in English. Glanni had only a moment to be surprised, however, as he suddenly found himself being lifted bodily into the air. The cop swung him round like he was made of string and slung him over his shoulder. He then started running back through the rapidly piling snow to City Hall while Glanni wriggled, kicked, cursed and spat entirely in vain.

How had they known to wait for him? He guessed the Danish government probably put the word out about the car, but he couldn’t believe it had even reached this asshole of the world. He wondered if they’d extradite him, or if Icelandic prisons were better or worse than Norwegian ones. At this point he was beginning not to care, so long as they were slightly warmer than he was right now. The cold was filling his head with a blank whiteness, and forming coherent thoughts was becoming impossible

He came back to rationality to find he’d been placed in a plastic chair in a large municipal building. Two male voices argued nearby in words he couldn’t understand. A woman with curlers in her hair pressed a warm cup into his hand. She smiled. Glanni realised he had a blanket round his shoulders as well. Pretty hospitable for an arrest.

The cop reappeared from round the corner. His coat still done up over his face, his shoulders shelved with fresh snow. He was trailed by another police officer, a middle aged man of seemingly lower rank; gangly and, Glanni observed, unintelligent-looking. The second man spoke.

“There is no more room in the hotel. Nobody can leave town so there’s no room anywhere.”

Glanni blinked at the second officer. Something about this seemed strange. The first cop, the one with the superhuman strength, started to unbutton his coat.

“I don’t know what made you think you can park there. This is clearly the town square. And with this blizzard who knows when you’ll be able to move your car. Stupid to be driving in this weather anyway. You could have died out there.”

Glanni was no longer listening to the second officer. The first cop undid all the buttons on his coat, pulled off his thick gloves and then unzipped the front.

Glanni liked to think of himself as a great observer of people; an expert at sussing their weak points quickly and exploiting them. It was the trademark of a good salesman. And he was a great salesman. 

“If it were up to me, I’d throw you in the cells overnight on the parking violation. But the heating’s broken and you’d probably freeze. So the chief here… he says you’re going to come stay at my house.”

What did he think when he first saw the chief's face?

“Damn.”

“What was that?” The second cop demanded, clearly disgruntled.

“I mean, thanks.” Glanni corrected, flashing a grin at the skinny subordinate. He stood up, the blanket falling from his shoulders, and turned to the man who’d fireman lifted him out of the freezing cold. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Trying to drive in that storm. I’m late for a meeting with some very important people in Reykjavik. You know, governmental important, I don’t want to say too much.”

The subordinate gaped at him, Glanni ignored him.

“Very generous of you to let me stay at your deputy’s house.” He laughed internally at the indignant spluttering behind him. He stuck a hand out. “To whom do I owe the favour?”

The police officer looked him in the face, properly this time. He was a handsome, sandy-haired man of around 40. He had a well-trimmed moustache and beard and eyes of a steely light blue. He wasn’t tall, but even in the bulky coat, his powerful frame was noticeable, and Glanni had felt the power in those arms already. 

The police officer shook his hand, and Glanni was pleased to feel heat in his firm grip.

“Íþró.” He responded. His voice strongly accented, his gaze unwavering. “I’m the chief of police here.”

“Pleasure to meet you.” He responded. It really was.

A couple of days ago, if someone had asked him where he LEAST wanted to be, hiding out in a small town in Iceland after a fence went violently wrong, hemmed in by a blizzard and toting a stolen car would probably have been high on that list. But Glanni was suddenly optimistic that it might not be so bad after all.


	2. Day 2: The flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story got a lot more in-depth very quickly. But I have the story planned out now, so updates should be regular. Still gonna try and get it wrapped up in 7.

The Deputy left the house that morning at about 3am.

Glanni wasn’t sleeping. He’d allowed himself to be grudgingly delivered to the guest bedroom at the Policeman’s house where he’d installed himself in front of the window and watched as the blizzard grew thicker and deadlier with the passing hours.

By the state of the place, it looked like the deputy lived alone, however there were signs that this might not always have been the case. For one thing the place was too big to be a bachelor pad, and too chintzy. Glanni had gotten used to houses in this part of Europe looking like they could be disassembled and reassembled at will, but this place bore little touches of care, maybe even long-neglected love. In the guest room, the curtains had tassels, and little matching ties to either side. There was a small framed painting of a dog in a boat. He was provided only a sleeping bag on top of a bare mattress, but there was a pink dressing gown hanging on the back of the door. There was nothing hanging up in the wardrobe, but piled in the bottom were five or six plastic bags containing clothing. Women’s clothing.

Either the Deputy had an alter-ego, or somebody left this place without taking the time to pack their things.

He searched through the bags to find very little of interest. A string of pearls, a few pairs of earrings and a locket which he pocketed immediately; real or false he could probably sell them when he got back to civilisation. Whoever this woman was she had expensive but poor taste. She liked fur-trimmings and salmon pink, and was a fan of the shoulder pad. He was rummaging through a make-up bag full of pink lipsticks when he heard the Deputy leave.

The storm was in full-pelt, and the wind blustered round the house with a worryingly fulsome sound. Glanni crept to the window and squinted through the whirring grey snow; he heard the sound of a cold engine turning over, and a pair of yellow headlights sprang to life, before disappearing into the abyss. And this from the man who’d called him stupid for driving in this weather.

Glanni wrapped himself in a pink, fur-lined coat and found half a packet of imported French cigarettes in the pocket. He smoked them methodically, the red glow drifting bright then dull in front of his eyes. When the car returned it was almost 6am. It stood outside the house for a further 20 minutes before the deputy came back inside. Glanni put out his last cigarette and listened for the sound of the officer climbing the stairs. But he never did.

When daylight finally arrived, Glanni decided it was time to quit this miserable little place.

The entire town was situated at the foot of a huge white mountain, pockmarked with dark coloured rock. From the Deputy’s house, Glanni could see more or less the entire town tumbling down towards the Fjord, where the ferry from yesterday was still docked. The coastline stretched beyond in a long, black, volcanic beach, and then nothing more but endless ice and ocean. When he checked back through the house, the Deputy must already have left for the day.

Glanni borrowed the pink coat. He also borrowed a dusky pink lipstick and a coat of mascara before trudging his way back through the snow to the town square. The place was a tundra under the low, overcast sky, and Glanni could barely see the small hill where the Danish Prime Minister’s car was now entirely buried.

With all this beautiful, virginal white everywhere, it took Glanni until he was in almost right in front of the municipal hall to realise that something was very wrong here.

The building into which yesterday he’d been carried like a babe in arms, was now surrounded by orange and white traffic cones connected with official-looking tape. There were people dotted around, in twos or threes, hanging on the threshold of this makeshift perimeter, while the deputy and the police chief stood close together talking earnestly. They were guarding something. As Glanni approached it became very obvious what they were guarding.

Only the merest trace of blood marred the fresh powder. It had splattered it’s way from something that ought to have been comical. That really ought only to have existed in a cartoon. There was a man-shaped indentation in the snow on the front-steps of city hall.

As he watched, two more people emerged from the municipal hall in high visibility jackets, carrying a stretcher between them. This didn’t seem right.

The energy in the crowd had changed. There were more people now, despite the early hour, wrapped up in coats and scarves, coming from every direction. They greeted their neighbours in their languorous tongue and joined the vigil. There was more chatter, more edging forwards. A couple of tired-looking young men joined the group to Glanni’s right and talked in low murmurs to one another.

The two officers noticed the shift in the atmosphere, and as the pair with the stretcher strapped-in their grim cargo, the chief of police - the one who had called himself Íþró - stepped forward to address the crowd.

“Athygli!” He called, then held up a finger while he exchanged another short word with the deputy, who then went back to attend to the stretcher.

“Attention, please.” He repeated. “There are people here from the ferry, so I will say this in English.” He cleared his throat.

“There has been an incident. Please be assured that we are dealing with it, and move ahead with your day.” The Chief paused, nobody moved, Glanni normally wasn’t one to sympathise with cops but he felt a little sorry for the guy. He continued. “The storm last night has made the mountain road impassable, and it looks like we will have more snowfall tonight. The weather has also made flying in and out of the town impossible for now. If you have come from the ferry and found yourself stranded here, I urge you to be patient, you will be well looked afte-”

Shouting suddenly erupted from the section of the crowd nearest to the steps. The stretcher-bearers were standing up. The deputy was doing his best to shield their cargo from view, but there was no hiding something so strange. The body itself was covered, but hanging down to one side of the stretcher was a flap of red fabric bearing, unmistakably, the 'superman' logo.

Glanni was suddenly knocked to the side as the two boys standing nearby rushed closer.

“Það er Siggi!” Yelled one of them, who was wearing a bulky yellow parka and a green woollen hat.

“Siggi!” The shout passed through the crowd with gasps and groans. The Chief signalled for order and dispatched the deputy to hold people back from the barrier as they finished taking the body indoors. He was now addressing the anxious crowd in stern Icelandic.

Glanni backed off. This was just fucking perfect. Trapped in the armpit of Europe, in a town where even the locals were so depressed they tried to fly off clock towers. And even if the mountain road were passable, his car was buried under two tons of snow inside a cordoned-off area. His only consolation was that all of the rest of this nonsense might keep the police in this town busy enough that they wouldn’t look too hard at any APBs coming in from Denmark.

Nothing to do now but wait. 

Glanni was seized with a sudden urge to howl at the ocean. He could handle anything but boredom. Boredom is what led him to feed his little brother nothing but glacier mints for two days to see if it would give him a cold. Boredom is what led him to join, then leave, and then rejoin the Dublin Satanists’ Union (he still carried a membership card… or he had until recently he supposed.)

He checked the Chauffeur's wallet. There were still a few Danish Kroner in here, but Glanni had no idea how long that might have to last, or if he could even spend those here. He probably couldn’t risk selling the jewellery until he was out of town.

He was replacing the stolen wallet in his stolen coat when his hand touched something else that he’d stolen but forgotten about. The official papers from the glove compartment. Of course, he’d rescued them from the sodden chauffeur's coat last night and dried them on the radiator. He had no idea what they said, but they were from the office of the Danish Prime Minister and they sure looked official. This was it; this was how he was going to entertain himself for this little adventure. Now, which one of these provincial suckers could he convince to buy him breakfast?

The Hotel Bar, as it turned out, extended a generous line of credit to strangers who claimed to be in town on official government business. The red-haired girl behind the bar was very excited when he revealed to her, completely confidentially of course, that he was a personal friend of the Danish Prime Minister. This was a good lie, and it got him almost everything he wanted. 

"How about a suite? Do you have any rooms with built-in jacuzzis?"

She apologised profusely, then went and got the manager who also came and apologised profusely again, they weren’t able to offer him a room tonight. Not unless somebody left, and with the road closed that would undoubtedly mean somebody else taking another flying leap.

Great, another night in Deputy Attitude’s secret-wife room.

The tragedy in town didn’t seem to be slowing business. Glanni stayed in the bar for most of the day, steadily working his way from whiskey to whiskey, and the place remained reasonably busy throughout. Mainly it was tourists from the ferry. However, at about 5pm, with darkness having already fallen over the sun-starved land and the snow now falling thickly once more, two people entered the bar who certainly were not tourists.

Glanni had been trying to shake a boring old German man for the best part of 40 minutes. They’d steadily matched each other for drinks during a lively conversation about the bar district in downtown Frankfurt, but now the old man’s eyes had drooped as he reminisced about largely uneventful summers as a boy wandering around Sachsenhausen, lost loves, long-held regrets, etc. Glanni’s attention wandered quite naturally to the newcomers. It was the two boys from that morning, and they were hard to miss.

He judged them both to be around their early 20s. The taller one in yellow was bony and stooped; he seemed to be swimming around in his oversized coat and baggy jeans. This boy had a certain look about him that Glanni had come to know well. It was the sort of look that told him that this kid’s socks probably had little marijuana leaves on them. The other was shorter and stockier, but possibly even more poorly assembled. His silver puffer jacket and enormous digital watch were one thing, but he also wore a pair of ski goggles on his forehead, right under a tangle of frazzled-looking green hair.

In short, Glanni knew before he even approached them that this was a pair of small-time local drug dealers.

Once they’d exchanged a few words with the girl behind the bar, they went and took a seat towards the back of the room. Glanni saw his chance to escape, picked up a few beers on his tab, and went over to make his introduction.

The boys, after a couple of drinks, had proved very friendly.

“To Siggi!”

The two of them drained their glasses. 

“To Siggi.” Glanni repeated, finishing his own drink and indicating to the red-haired girl for another round. “But having been here for about 24 hours now, I can see his point.”

“Yo man, you don’t know anything about it here. It’s not so bad.” The one in yellow had removed his ridiculous yellow coat to reveal he was wearing a ridiculous yellow hoodie underneath, presumably for ease of distinction. He said his name was Jives, which sounded like a lie to Glanni. The other one, who had not removed his ski-goggles despite having been indoors for over an hour now, stifled a laugh. “What?” Retorted 'Jives.'

“No, It definitely is that bad.”

“Goggi, Þegiðu.” Jives shot back. The other one rolled his eyes and addressed Glanni.

“You shut up, Maggi.” The yellow boy flushed. “I’m serious. I’m leaving this shitty little town as soon as I can afford it. You can only get TV signal if you live right on the coast. There’s only two houses with dial-up. I own the only cell phone in the whole fucking place. I think half the people here have thought about doing what Siggi did.”

“No way, man!” Jives, or Maggi, was shaking his head vehemently. “There’s no fucking way he did it. He fell or some shit. We know Siggi, dude, there’s just no way.”

Goggi considered this.

“I know what you mean. Of all the people here, Siggy was probably one of the least miserable. It just wasn’t who he is. Don’t get me wrong, he was a massive fucking loser. A fat nerd who still slept in a bed that looked like a rocket ship.”

“Yeah, I saw the whole… Superman thing.” Glanni commented.

“Yeah man! And that’s not even the worst of it. Maggi and me-”

“Jives..” The kid in yellow interjected, sulking.

“Jives and me have known him since we were in school together. He never changed since he was 7 years old. I swear. Sweet, though. The kid would do anything for anyone.

“Yo, what if somebody pushed him?” Jives said it quietly, something seemed to spark behind his eyes.

“Like who?” Shot back Goggi, who was immediately distracted by the beeping of his supposedly lonely cellphone. He took it out and looked at it. He and Jives suddenly looked very serious, bordering on solemn. Glanni looked from one to the other.

“We’re on.” Goggi said quietly.

“Who’s on?” Asked Glanni, as innocently as he was able. The two boys scrutinised him.

"What did you say you were doing here, man?" Asked the much shrewder boy in the goggles. Glanni looked between the pair and shrugged.

"I stole the prime minister of Denmark's car after a failed fence, got on the wrong ferry and now I'm defrauding your little town because I'm bored." This was it. Had he bought them enough drinks? Had he been the right combination of trustworthy and morally ambiguous?

“Yo… wanna get involved with a little job we’re doing?” He supposed he must have.

“Sure.”

When he left the hotel bar, the three of them slipping out before anybody could ask him about his tab, it was fully dark and the wind was picking up again,. Glanni felt his face go immediately numb. They’d been light on the details, for obvious reasons, but Glanni’s inferences were proving right as they headed towards the harbour and the still-docked ferry therein.

When they reached the empty harbour, Goggi signalled to Glanni to keep watch round the front of the customs office while he and Jives wandered into a maze of shipping crates. Glanni had seen this before; staff on these sorts of ferries were paid so pitifully that it would be more stupid NOT to smuggle narcotics. So Goggi was the contact and Jives, laughably, was the street smarts. It occurred to Glanni that this must normally be a three-man operation. Perhaps he was standing where sweet, obliging Siggi would normally stand, warming his hands in his armpits.

If he could get a cut of this, perhaps do a share of the slinging, that would do a great deal for getting him off this frozen fucking rock. He’d probably have to shell out for a new car at some point, and some fake papers to travel from Reykjavik. But things were looking up.

“Hello!”

Shit.

“Hello... Nice night for it!” Glanni responded, as the chief of police jogged up to him. Under the yellow light which hung from above the door of the customs office, Glanni noted with some resentment that the man looked like he belonged in a medieval portrait; he looked both exceedingly beautiful, and capable of fucking you up in three seconds flat.

“What are you doing out here, Mr… Rich, wasn’t it?”

Glanni resisted the urge to laugh in his face. He’d almost forgotten the fake name he’d come up with on the fly last night.

“Please, call me Ricky, Mr. Rich is my father, the Baronet.” He responded, changing his laugh into a clearing of the throat. The Chief nodded and, to Glanni’s frustration, stood next to him and looked out towards the fjord. The kids could be back at any moment. This wasn’t good.

“What are you doing out here, Ricky? The deputy is expecting you. He made dinner.”

“I’m just taking in the sights of your beautiful town.” The chief looked at him, an expression somewhere between amusement and suspicion on his face. “If you don’t mind me asking, Chief, what are YOU doing out here? Don’t you have a body to be dealing with?”

“That’s the problem. I’ve been talking to the head chef on the ferry to see if they have a walk-in freezer big enough to store it.”

“You’re joking.”

“Unfortunately not. The nearest hospital is over the mountain and nobody is going that way for another 48 hours at least if this holds up.” Glanni watched his face. He knew he ought to be more worried about the potential accidental bust that were to occur if he couldn't get the pig to leave, but he sure looked good with snow in his hair and beard. It reminded Glanni of a beer advert he’d once seen in a magazine in which a lumberjack stood on a snowy mountaintop, the muscles on his arms straining against his plaid shirt.

Glanni was taken from his reverie by the sound of shuffling feet from the direction of the customs crates. The chief twitched his face in the direction of the noise.

“Did you-”

Glanni sprang into action. He coughed loudly, then grabbed the chief by his arm and wheeled him round so he was facing away from the emerging shadows.

“Do you work out, Chief?” He asked, loudly. The police officer blinked at him. “Only I noticed yesterday when you were… carrying me that you’re pretty damn strong.” Glanni tried, using eye signals alone, to tell the two stupid boys who had stepped out of the shadows to go round the other way.

“I don-” The chief started, looking down at Glanni’s hand which was on his upper arm.

“Or maybe you’re just naturally like this. Genetics, right? Crazy! Has anybody ever told you that you could model for beer ads?” Íþró was clearly wondering now whether this was a language barrier problem. Meanwhile the two would-be drug barons ducked behind the customs office. While the chief was distracted, Glanni gestured to them to get to the other end of the harbour.

“Beer ads?”

“You know! Beautiful man, big mountain. Nice cold beer. Do you… want to get a beer... with me?” Íþró gaped at him. There was a moment of very strained silence in which Glanni watched as two lanky shadows scampered over to the other side of the harbour.

“I uh… Ricky… What are you trying to say? I’m married.”

“Uhuh.” Glanni wasn’t paying attention. He saw the pair slip past the barrier, and finally allowed himself the chance to exhale. When he looked back at the chief, he was gratified to see that the man looked genuinely apologetic.

“So…”

“So…” Glanni repeated.

“No! I should probably be getting back… to her.”

“Right.” he said, tuning back into the conversation. “Right. Well. Can’t fault a guy for trying. You have fun sleeping with your wife, I gotta go.”

He bolted before the police chief had a chance to say anything else.

Running through the pelting breeze, Glanni was now aware that his face felt incredibly hot in spite of the cold. That hadn’t exactly been his smoothest moment. Still, nobody had been arrested, so if he stopped to think about it, that was about as good as he could have hoped. He'd definitely, however, lost a few years on his life to stress.

But that was okay. When he caught up with those two feckless kids, he'd make sure to return the favour.


	3. Day 3: Poison and Politics

Glanni woke on the third day to a panic so intense that he couldn’t remember what country he was in.

Coming into consciousness was never easy for Glanni, which was why he went to great pains to enter a state of unconsciousness as seldom as possible. He had dreamed of shifting black sands under a bruised, grey sky. A jagged compound fracture of mountain erupting through smothering snowbanks. Stumbling towards its peak, purposeless but morbidly drawn to the crest of its broken-bone summit. Never getting closer. Faceless and fingerless with chill. Climbing and climbing as the earth rose and the sky lowered around, until neither was distinguishable from the other. Just white. White powder. But not pure white. There was something among the grains. Something dark and sharp, that when dragged through flesh by the relentless wind, flayed to the bones and left dark red grease-spots on the pristine mountainside.

When Glanni raised his hands in front of his face, he half expected them to be skinless and bleeding.

They weren’t. But his fingernails were filthy. How was it always when he blacked out, he woke up with filthy fingernails? Always made him wonder. But some questions, he felt, were best left unanswered.

Sleeping bag. Wardrobe. Picture of dog in boat. He fed the information into his brain and groped about for an internal light-switch. Chintzy curtains. Bags of clothes. Cold. Very cold. Listing things to keep the thrumming fear at bay. Where was this place? What was he doing here?

“-held ekki að það er svo einfalt.”

A voice. He remembered a handsome but serious face, and a uniform. The cop. He was in Iceland. He was in the deputy’s house in a small Icelandic town, and somewhere on the other side of that wall, the chief of police had come to call.

The rush of relief was as instantaneous as the returning flow of recent memories, and for a few moments he sat there and soaked in it. He then forgot the panic, and the dream, and pushed it under the same mental rug he reserved for guilt and unpaid bills. Glanni had lived his whole life through a process of selective remembering that served him very well. It didn’t keep him out of trouble, but ensured that serious danger left very little psychological mark on him, and thus he could glide through life, shedding his skins and troubles like a snake. It was only in the mindless absence of morning that, pooling in the bottom of his psyche like toxic waste, the fear that should otherwise have trickled through his everyday life hit him in these concentrated blasts.

But if you don’t sleep, you don’t have to wake up.

The conversation continued through the wall. It was heated. Whatever the mealy-mouthed, ferrety deputy was saying to the chief, it wasn't going down well. It looked like local law enforcement were feeling the strain.

There was a shout, and a thump, and then the slamming of a door. Íþró must have gone. Glanni sprang to his feet, pleased to find that he’d slept with his boots on, grabbed the fur-collared coat and tore through the house. He ignored the shout of the deputy and caught the chief just as he was getting into a black range rover parked outside the small house. He knocked on the window.

“Can I get a lift into town?”

Glanni didn’t intimidate easily. But if he did, the look the Police Chief gave him at that moment would have turned him to custard. 

His eyes were red-rimmed and stormy, the cold and the fury blotched his freckled cheeks, and his jaw was clenched in the attitude of a man currently engaged in the act of grinding his teeth to sore nubs. Glanni stared back. Faintly in the window he could see that yesterday’s mascara had smudged an ink-stain under his left eye, right where the faint signs of road rash from three days ago still marked him like red biro. There was also a new cut above his right eyebrow. Huh.

Looking like this, he might not have trusted him either.

He was surprised then, when the Chief gave a curt nod and opened the passenger door.

It was slow going over the impacted snow of three days. After a few minutes. Íþró began to talk.

"You're lucky that you're not from around here."

Glanni was surprised, but knew when not to express it.

“It’s all connected. No matter what he says. These things don’t happen by accident. For some reason he's desperate to just waste time until Reykjavik get here and there’s no evidence left to find. They’ll turn up, announce it a suicide and disappear.” They clattered over a hillock that might once have been a curb, or perhaps someone’s bicycle. "How does something like this happen?"

Glanni closed his eyes for a moment. The emotion in the Chief's voice was a little too much for this time in the morning, and Glanni had a headache poking at the back of his left eye.

"I don't know. Sometimes kids get depressed."

“One, maybe. But six?"

"Six?" Glanni opened his eyes.

"Just last night. Five more... attempts. Alive, thank god, but in terrible condition. There’s no hospital this side of the mountain; the doctor’s got them in the school infirmary, but they need more than that. This town isn’t like this.” He looked over at Glanni, directing the tempest of his mood entirely his way. “It’s a happy place!” He seethed. “And we’ve never had a single suicide for as long as I’ve lived here. Why now? Why would five kids take the same poison in one night? And poor Siggi. There’s no way. I don’t care what he says, there’s just no way.”

Glanni froze.

“Poison?”

“Where would they even get something like that? Could it be some sort of a pact? It's all connected.”

Glanni scraped around his memory for the missing chunks of last night. He didn’t remember a great deal after leaving the harbour. They went back to Jives’ basement flat under his mother’s house and weighed and bagged up the product. Somewhere in the process he’d been handed a bottle of vodka. They were both getting keyed up and offered him some to try but for some reason he refused. That didn’t sound like him, but he didn’t take any, he remembered that quite clearly. Everything else was speculative really. Streets. Snow. More young people, hunched, their faces and genders barely distinguishable under anonymous winter clothing. Running. Was there running? He ran his hand over the small cut above his eyebrow. Below it was a small but painful rising bump. Did he fall or was he hit?

Íþró, meanwhile, was still talking.

“-And I’m no forensic expert, but I don’t think that fall alone would have killed him. Not onto that much snow. It’s all wrong.”

“That’s what some kids I spoke to said. They didn’t think your boy was the suicidal type.” If Glanni had known that the Chief would slam the brakes on so hard that his stomach would almost come bungeeing out of his mouth, maybe he wouldn't have bothered rejoining the conversation.

“What did you say?” He asked, his stern face suddenly looming above Glanni’s hangover. He turned to the cop and put on his most guileless expression.

“I talked to some young people yesterday. Goggi and Maggi? They said they knew… Ziggy? Was it? They were very surprised; they said he wasn’t the suicidal type. But I suppose no-one really knows-”

“That's very interesting.” Íþró said, turning back front, his eyes narrowed to the steering wheel.

“Well, people are complicated. It sounds to me like the kid had plenty to be miserable about.” Glanni observed that the officer’s knuckles on the wheel were turning white.

“... You should know both those boys are among those in the infirmary now. Did they say anything else? Anything at all? Did they seem like they had something on their minds?"

Glanni's mind was racing. All he could do was dumbly shake his head. What was cut into that shit? It was nothing they'd done to it so it had to have come from the source on the boat. What the hell had they been selling to every teenager in this town last night?

Íþró carried on.

"He came to me earlier that day... Siggi did... and said he had something to tell me. He said it was important. He wouldn’t talk to the deputy, or even the mayor, only to me and I was… I was distracted. Siggi's never exactly been all there. I wouldn’t normally ignore him. I wouldn't normally ignore anyone. But my wife... but it was a difficult day. I told him to come back tomorrow.”

In a movement so sudden that Glanni instinctively jerked back, hitting the back of his head against the car window, the Police Chief thumped his fist on the steering wheel. The horn sounded once. A short blast which tore through the thick, sleepy air of the town and then faded back into the sounds of wind and sea.

There was a long silence as Glanni listened to the Chief's puffs of breath slowly elongate. When Íþró was calm once again, he restarted the engine of the stalled vehicle.

Glanni watched the Chief drive. Then he offered an opinion.

“Why wait for Reykjavik? Any idiot can see that something’s going on here. Even me. But if I was a police officer from a real city, I wouldn’t want to stay here longer than I had to. Not if I could get away with calling it a suicide.”

The Chief’s expression didn’t change.

“So why wait? If it’s not a suicide, and it’s not an accident, what does that make it? You’re the cop, aren’t you?” He asked. He watched with some pleasure as Íþró’s cheek twitched. He pulled up outside the city hall and turned off the engine, then he turned to Glanni. His face was largely unchanged, but Glanni thought for just the moment that their eyes met, he could see a spark of something that was energetic, alive, and almost playful.

“You’re right. I am.” He said. Then got out of the car.

\---

It took Glanni a moment to register the short, rotund man who was toddling up to them. He was chattering in rapid Icelandic to the Chief who was trying to calm him down. Glanni watched as the older man gripped Íþró’s coat, his face a pink relief-map of concern. Íþró glanced at Glanni and put his hands on the short man’s shoulders, easing him to arm’s length, talking to him gently.

“Mayor, have you met Mr. Rich?” he said, switching into English for the purpose of the introduction. Wrongfooted, the small man looked curiously into Glanni’s face. He had kind but unintelligent features; the features of a perfect dupe. “He was passing through town on his way to Reykjavik meet with the President when the blizzard hit. I had meant to introduce you earlier, but what with everything.”

The Mayor - as this unlikely little man must surely have been - continued to blink at Glanni with small, moleish eyes. Glanni broke out a large smile and extended a hand.

“Good day, Mr. Mayor. It's a pleasure.”

Dumbfounded, he looked back at Íþró, who smiled reassuringly.

“Shall we go inside?” He prompted. The little man jumped, as though poked in the spine.

“Yes! Of course, please come inside, Mr. Rich. You must have some tea. Oh my, Forgive my manners.”

Which was how Glanni found himself ushered into city hall and sat down in the Mayor’s office, listening to a short man in a green suit enthusiastically tell him how they hoped to capitalise on the financial boom that had come with the late nineties by overhauling industry in their town through private investment. During the talk, Glanni kept his eyes on Íþró, who stood at the back of the room and smiled fondly at the absurd little man.

Thinking about it, however, the Mayor wasn’t half so absurd as Íþró himself, who was more and more of a mystery to Glanni. Clearly an intelligent and capable man, and probably a decent cop, wasting his life in this depressing little volcanic pit. Married. Though Glanni could feel that it may not have been so simple. Straight. Maybe so, but Glanni had a history of ensuring that wasn’t so simple either. His instincts on the matter were seldom entirely wrong. All the same, from day one he’d been unable to get a proper read on the guy, and as time went on what little he knew seemed less and less accurate. There was something about the Chief’s credulity, his firm goodness, his readiness to accept everything at face value that made Glanni wonder if he hadn’t seen through everything from the start, and wasn’t existing on some higher plane where such things were not important. And yet there was also something almost endearingly naive about this older man.

“So, will you be talking to the president about our town? I'm sure he'd be very interested in our plans!” Asked the Mayor, finally taking a seat behind his large wooden desk.

Glanni glanced up, delighted that the municipal lecture was over.

“Oh absolutely. I’ll make sure he knows to invest in… fishing… Is it fishing that you…?” He cleared his throat. “Of course it’s fishing.” He muttered. “What else do you people do?”

“Be-because there’s more to us than it seems and… and we could really use a little more attention. Considering the ferry comes through here. We could really get a lot more tourism and... other value if… if the government would only…” Glanni noticed little beads of sweat on the small man’s forehead. He had a round-cheeked face upon which small reddish blots were appearing. “You don’t know what it would mean to us. What we’d do to make sure this little town survives.”

“Mayor?” Íþró stepped forward and put a hand on the Mayor’s shoulder. He muttered to him in Icelandic, but the little man shook his head and returned a pained smile. The Chief met Glanni’s eye and gave a sort of shrug, but Glanni wasn’t quite so in the dark. 

Glanni didn’t exactly feel guilt himself, but he knew what it looked like in other people.

“Ástin mín!”

A call seemed to resonate from all around. High-pitched and fluting. The Mayor looked up, eyes wide. Glanni saw a sort of mad panic cross his features for just a second before the door to the office blasted open, and an enormous woman strode into the room. The Mayor’s face immediately split into a dopey smile as he stood to attention, barely reaching this woman’s shoulder, to receive an air-kiss from the glittering behemoth.

Íþró also straightened up warily as she entered the room. She was talking quickly now while the Mayor nodded along. She removed from her hands a pair of thin gloves which she thrust in the Mayor's direction, before going up to Íþró, above whom she also towered and talking to him in what was immediately a recognisably softer tone. The Chief struggled to maintain a smile as she spoke. She placed a hand under his chin and muttered something more, while Íþró almost seemed to shrink into himself. The Mayor interceded at that point, tapping her on the shoulder and saying in English.

“My dear, we have a guest.” He gestured to Glanni, who remained seated, and arranged his face into his ‘charming’ smile.

When this woman’s eyes finally found their way to Glanni, they barely brushed his face and instead went straight to his coat. Then her expression underwent a sort of implosion. Every line in her middle-aged face overspilled it’s plumped and moisturised surface to deepen as each one of her features raced the others to the centre of her face. Her lip drew up towards her nose in a snarl, her brow furrowed down to eclipse her eyes and her significant cheeks pinched until even her jowls were taut with this intense but indefinable loathing.

“Stina, my love, this is Mr. Rich. He’s a friend of the President. And Mr. Rich, this is my wife, Stina.”

Glanni rose languidly to his feet, fascinated and horrified by this woman’s reaction to him. Normally he was a hit with middle-aged ladies.They proved a great source of income when other jobs weren’t coming in regularly. 

"What a beautiful young wife you have, Mayor. I'm impressed." He said, taking one of her plump hands and rising it to his lips. This was a ridiculous thing to do, and this woman looked like she was about to bite him. So in the end he just couldn't help himself. "Delighted to meet you, madam."

And so pleasantries were exchanged. 

At length Stina turned back to her husband, her voice a lamentation.

"But I must return to my duties. I really have only dropped in for a moment. Those poor children can't spare me for a second."

Íþró, who had seemed rather restless during all of the previous airy chatter, was suddenly back in the room.

"Have you been with the kids in the infirmary? Has there been any change?"

She shook her head mournfully.

"No. Terrible. Just terrible. We've been radioing from the school for an air ambulance but nothing can fly while the winds are this high. And three more were brought in this morning."

"Three!" Cried Íþró. "All the same? Poisoned?"

Stina gave a soft 'hmmph'.

"If that's what you'd call it."

"What do you mean?" Asked the Mayor, looking between the two of them, his expression distressed and helpless. "My love, the doctor said their symptoms matched poisoning. Self-inflicted."

"Oh, it was self-inflicted no doubt." She began, almost airily. Then her expression did another swooping change; adopting now the stern, yet solemn attitude of a duty-bound truth teller. "But I can't imagine what made all these sweet young people turn to drugs. It's truly awful. Drugs! And do you know where they come from? The ferry, that's where. They're shuttled in by goodness knows who over in goodness knows where."

The Mayor blinked at his wife, then looked over at Glanni, clearly mortified.

"My love, if we could talk about this la-"

"Of course the harbormaster must be sacked. And a new one instated immediately."

"Yes, yes, my love."

"One who is prepared to handle this sort of outrage properly. I have a candidate in mind already."

"Mr Rich! It was such a pleasure meeting you. I'm sure the Police Chief would be happy to show you the sights of our little town properly if you'd like to... just..." Sweat was running fully down the small man's face as he indicated towards the door of his office. Glanni felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Íþró, looking stormier than ever, gesturing that they should leave. Glanni didn't really want to; this conversation was the closest thing he'd had to proper entertainment in days, but all the same allowed himself to be steered into the hall of the municipal building where he and Íþró stood for a few moments in an embarrassed silence.

"Mr. Rich..."

Glanni glanced over at the police officer.

"You wouldn't... happen to have a cigarette would you?"

\--

They smoked the first one in silence. The Chief's face and body had been tensed as a cramped muscle when they hit the cold air. His eyes stayed concentrated on the spot in front of the municipal hall where the ill-fated Siggi has been found, but his mind was clearly racing in a million different directions. Glanni kept his eyes on the Chief, his mind running in largely two directions. The first concerned how wonderful this man looked with a cigarette in his mouth, but the second was slightly more troubling and threatened to eclipse his pleasant musings about the shape of Ithro's lips. How had the Mayor's wife known instantly about the ferry, when nobody else seemed to have a damn clue?

After the first was extinguished, Íþró's shoulders had returned to the angle at which they normally sat, however it seemed only right that Glanni should place two more in his mouth before rummaging for his stolen lighter.

That was when his hand closed around something else he had recently stolen. It was the locket he had taken from the same stash of belongings as his coat. The locket that had two names engraved on it. Names which had, at the time, meant nothing to him but now he believed contained a potentially explosive secret. He remembered Stina's first look at him and how her eyes had gone straight to his coat. It was as though she recognised it. No. It was more than that. In his pocket he thumbed open the locket, as though he could feel the juicy secret tucked away inside.

"What's wrong?" Asked Íþró, and Glanni snapped back to the present.

"Nothing." He mumbled through closed lips, and brought his lighter out from his other pocket. He lit the cigarettes and handed one to Ithro. "I was surprised that you..." He indicated to the cigarette. Íþró laughed softly.

"I don't. Not for a while, at least. And I'd never let my son see."

"What about your wife?" Asked Glanni, unable to resist poking a sore spot.

Íþró paused before answering.

"No, her either. We quit together not long after we got married. But I know she still does it in secret. Sometimes I give her a hard time over it. She's... We're going through a slightly rough patch right now. She's probably smoking a lot."

They passed a few more moments in silence. Then Glanni did something that was very unlike him. 

"I think I have something to show you."

He brought the locket out, the chain wrapped round his fingers. His fingernails still had a little chipped nail polish on them from happier times. "I found this..." He started. "In the deputy's house."

Íþró took the locket, taking his time rolling it in his hand, before opening it. Glanni almost felt nervous. This was the first time he had willingly supplied evidence of anything to a police officer and it was sort of thrilling.

Íþró looked at Glanni, then back at the engraving. Then his eyes drifted to the door of the municipal hall.

"Lolli og Stina."

Glanni laughed.

"I mean that's gotta be affairs 101; don't buy jewellery with both your names on it. And you wouldn't believe all the other stuff he's got stashed in his house, for her, presumably. Man, she's got expensive taste. Terrible. But expensive-"

He shut up swiftly when Íþró suddenly squared up to him. He wasn't tall, but he was broad and suddenly Glanni got the slightly frightening and slightly titillating sense that this man could snap him in half.

"You're not staying at the deputy's house anymore."

He didn't say it loudly. He didn't need to. The authority which radiated from the Chief at that moment was enough to melt the snow on Glanni's face. They were barely a couple of inches from each other now, and Glanni didn't know whether to smile or flinch.

"What did you think you were doing, going through my officer's personal belongings?"

Glanni swallowed.

"He lent me this coat... You saw yourself that I didn't have one when I arrived. When you princess-carried me into this very building." Íþró's expression didn't soften. "The locket just happened to be in the pocket. It was an accident that I found it at all."

Íþró narrowed his eyes and Glanni, who knew what Íþró was looking for from him, and was not going to give it to him. He kept his eyes firmly locked with the Chief's, and did not back down. There was a heat rising in the back of his neck, like the prickles of static electricity. He wondered, although he seldom did about anyone, how the Chief was feeling right about now.

"Don't you think it might be important?" He continued. "After all... Didn't you just say that everything was connected?"

This was how Glanni ended up staying at the Chief's house that night.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> This is actually my second fic in this approximate Universe. The first is 'Life in Colour' and can be found here (http://archiveofourown.org/works/9398264/chapters/21275570), but everything that happens in this story should stand alone.
> 
> You might also have noticed it's something of an homage to Nordic crime drama, particularly Trapped which is an Icelandic show. You should definitely try to get into it if you like that sort of thing.


End file.
